Layoffs Hit Freedom Communications as It Ceases Publication of LA Register (LA Times) Layoffs hit the Orange County Register on Tuesday after owner Freedom Communications ceased publication of its Los Angeles daily five months after it debuted. TheWrap A spokesperson for the LA Register said that 29 newsroom positions have been eliminated as a result of the paper’s shutdown. An unspecified number of employees will be transferred to the Orange County Register. WSJ / CMO Today The owner of Freedom Communications Inc., Aaron Kushner, who turned heads last year when he announced he was launching the daily newspaper, admitted Tuesday that the move was a failure. “As strong a newspaper as our team produced, our business model is a virtuous circle,” Kushner said in a statement. “If the support is not at a level that matches our investment, we have to adapt and make adjustments as we’ve done today.” HuffPost / AP Freedom said it will focus on markets in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It owns the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which it bought in November for more than $27 million. NYT The LA Register ceased publication with its Monday issue. Monday evening, Kushner sent a memo to his employees announcing the news. An article about the shutdown ran on the newspaper’s front page.

ISIS Releases New Video of Captured Journalist John Cantlie (HuffPost) The militant Islamic State group has released another propaganda video purportedly featuring captured British journalist John Cantlie. The video, which again shows Cantlie speaking in front of a camera in an orange jumpsuit, was released just after the U.S. and five Arab nations launched airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria Monday night. WSJ In the video, he warns citizens from the nations supporting U.S.-led military operations in Iraq and Syria that the foray will become a quagmire like Vietnam. The video is part of the slick and aggressive propaganda campaign that ISIS has rolled out to attract recruits and sway global opinion concerning the puritanical Islamist state it is trying to carve from swaths of Iraq and Syria. New York Daily News The footage shows Cantlie, held hostage by ISIS for 22 months, reading from a script provided by his captors while seated behind a desk for the latest in the terrorist group’s “lecture series.” “Senior U.S. politicians seemed content to call the Islamic State nasty names: awful, vile, a cancer, an insult to our values,” he said. “But such petty insults don’t really do much harm to the most powerful jihadist movement seen in recent history.” The Guardian In a previous video posted by the group, the freelance photographer — who has been a prisoner of ISIS for 22 months — made clear that he was making the films under duress. His references to U.K. military aid to Kurdish forces and French and Danish support for military action suggest that the video was made in recent days. Other aspects of the film, such as his stubble and the state of the orange jumpsuit in which he is dressed, suggest that it may have been made at the same time as the last video in which he was featured.

SiriusXM Suffers Crushing Loss in High-Stakes Courtroom Battle (THR / Hollywood, Esq.) A California federal judge has delivered a legal earthquake in the music industry by declaring Flo & Eddie of The Turtles the victors in a lawsuit against SiriusXM over the public performance of pre-1972 sound recordings. The plaintiffs are seeking $100 million in damages, but the money is hardly the only consequence of a ruling on Monday that could eventually disrupt the operations of the satellite radio giant as well as other services like Pandora. WSJ / Law Blog The case centered on the question of whether an ambiguously worded state law created royalty obligations for satellite and Internet radio companies that play music made before 1972. While federal copyright law covers post-1972 recordings, Congress left it up to states to set their own copyright rules for music released before then. NYT But The Turtles, whose hits were made well before that date, argued that when SiriusXM played its songs without seeking a license or paying the group royalties, it infringed on its copyright protections under state laws. The group filed class-action suits in California, Florida and New York. After the Turtles filed the suits, the major record companies followed with similar cases against both SiriusXM and Pandora Media, and industry groups have begun lobbying Congress over extending royalty laws to pre-1972 recordings. Reuters The ruling could potentially make it more expensive for satellite-radio broadcasters and Internet radio companies such as Pandora Media to feature classic songs on their playlists. In the ruling, judge Philip Gutierrez did not grant summary judgment on the claim that SiriusXM copied the songs improperly to create libraries, databases and voice transitions, saying many facts about the allegation are still in dispute.